February: We were elated to start it off with great celebrations of winning two awards from Families First Ni and being nominated for a third in June from Ni 4 Kids!

July & August: Brought us a full house in the Hangout Summer Camp giving the kids constant entertainment put forward by the kids committee.

September: seen the launch of our Daily Art and Music Sessions from our very own Atelieristas: Siobhan and Joann bringing the languages of Children alive through creative medias daily.

October: There’s only one Spooksville and yet again – WOW! just WOW!!!

December: When we embrace gratitude and kindness in every activity. We adored seeing the effort people gave in coming to our family night on such a cold winter’s evening but seeing the children light up with Santa and his gifts warmed all our hearts!

With trips, events and charity fundraisers all in between this year has been a fabulous one!

September 2018 marks the 10th Anniversary of Juniors and The Hangout and boy has it been fun! We look fondly on the past and are eternally grateful that we are reaching this milestone, even though it feels like only yesterday when we opened our doors in 2008.

Although we said good bye to some wonderful people who we’ve had the pleasure of working with they too have dreams to chase and adventures to add to their personal journeys. We wish them nothing but happiness and glad they were part of our memories.

With being able to offer new opportunities to aspiring new staff and through training and role modeling from those who have mastered so many crafts here; we have been able to make great changes, new roles, and further the development and knowledge of our Team throughout this year.

When we tell people we work in childcare they don’t fully understand that it is not just a job, it is a vocation. To us it goes beyond providing an education or providing care for working families, it’s about building a foundation through stimulation, sensitivity, giving autonomy; to allow children to create, question and evolve their mind, ability and character into the person they want to be. We are the support, we are not the leaders in their play we are here to scaffold their ideas, respect their initiative by acknowledging their amazing thought process and making it become a reality – we absolutely adore learning from them!

Each day provides us with more and more ways of enhancing children’s development for us to offer play opportunities of investigation, invention and experimenting encourages their love to learn and in turn teach us their much loved thinking.

Every year we enjoy reflecting on everything we have learned together and implement that knowledge into new and exciting Company plans – and we have some wonderful plans in place this year!

Working with children and their families is a great honour and we thank you for choosing us. This year we are committed in continuing to raise awareness of the advantages to our alternative curriculum, health & well being and child led practices. Thank you for being an ambassador of our vision!

From our family to yours, we wish you a very happy and healthy New Year!